


Since Roving's Been My Ruin

by RobberBaroness



Category: Treasure Island - Lavery
Genre: F/M, Female Jim Hawkins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:09:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24312538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/pseuds/RobberBaroness
Summary: There is one story I have not told.
Relationships: Jim Hawkins/Long John Silver
Comments: 3
Kudos: 19
Collections: Nonconathon 2020





	Since Roving's Been My Ruin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nonnymouse](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonnymouse/gifts).



Although my stories of treasure-hunting and pirate-fighting have been published to some success in the papers, there is one story I have not told. Perhaps I will someday, when I am an old woman and I write my final memoirs. I will not be bawdy and saucy in them, I shall simply include one sentence I do not usually say.

“And then, against my will, the pirate forced himself upon me.”

One sentence. It is hard to believe so much can be carried in one sentence. It is only a single rocking of the waves on the voyage through my story, after Billy Bones’ death and before Long John Silver's. My dignity was nothing but a side note in the story of the treasure. Many lost their lives, a loss far outweighing my own. The only person I’ve ever told was Dr. Livesay, whom I swore to secrecy, and who threw a fuss over it that even I thought was more than the matter deserved.

But if I were to write out in full that little, unimportant story in my memoirs, or if I were to find another sympathetic ear- perhaps a husband or a lover someday, a worldly sea-faring man who does not shy away from girls who have had adventures- this is what I would say.

When Silver led me away from the other pirates as they made camp for the night, I knew in my bones that something was wrong. I thought of Ben Gunn and Captain Flint, and how very recently Silver had ordered his men to fire upon me- how very easy it was for this man I had lately worshipped to move his heart from friendship to murder. Still, the rest of his mutineers held no special love for me apart from my ability to read and to navigate, and I was as safe with him as I might have been with any of them.

When he kissed me, it was the first time I truly understood how unsafe I was. Throughout our voyage on the Hispaniola, up until I’d heard his conversation while hidden in the barrel of apples, I had dreamed a foolish girl’s dreams of kissing my hero. Now that his lips were upon me, rather than pleasure or excitement, I felt almost sick. It was what I had wanted and a great blow against me, all in one. He had been safe to dream about. He was no longer safe.

Some of my unkinder readers might ask why I did not cry out then, but consider my position. Who was there to hear my cries for help but Silver’s fellow pirates? What would they have done, save laughed or mocked- or worse, demanded their kisses from me as well? But though I was quiet, you may believe me that I did say no to Silver when he pulled me down upon the ground, and that he heard it clearly, for he put a finger upon my lips to order me silent.

“Hush, my good, clever girl,” he told me. “You’re a pirate now. There is no need to abide by the rules they set for you onshore.” He kissed me again, and this time I pushed back against him and tried to slip from his grasp, but he held me there, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his body against mine.

I knew what went between a man and a woman when they were alone- Grandma had told me when I did not need or want the lesson, just as a cautionary tale of what might befall an innocent girl who got herself into the clutches of a sailor. I was a girl of 16, she said, a pretty prey for scoundrels in a seaside inn. I had reacted with disgust, then slowly, as I thought over it, I had started to wonder at it at night. I knew in any case that no man held a girl down upon the ground only to be stopped by a fit of conscience- or that if he did, it was a miracle I could not hope for.

Another betrayal from a man well-practiced in them. I had time to wonder how many other women had suffered such a fate at his hands. I had accepted his being a pirate- I had not stopped to consider what had happened to the people onboard the ships he took. Had there been any unlucky female passengers he had taken as his share of treasure, pressed down to see the same face I was seeing, my sisters in misfortune?

As I thought these things, my struggles died down and my body felt stiff and heavy as a corpse. I could not fight him off, but now my limbs would have refused to cooperate even if I could have. His metal leg pressed down upon me, as if it had been designed for the exact purpose of holding me in place. Silver kissed me across my neck- that neck he would have cut if there’d been even a shilling of profit in it for him- and my resistance shrank into my words.

“I don’t want this. Please, Silver-”

“You’ll want it well enough once I’ve taught you how it’s done. My clever girl, you learn things so easily. There’s many a worse man who could have been your first, and I’ll see to it that none of them ever touch you. You belong to me, and no other.”

When he leaned upwards to undo his belt, I saw my chance to run. But between my frozen limbs and his quick eye, before I had moved a hand’s distance away he easily grabbed me by the front of my shirt and pulled me back beneath him. A stern look from his eye told me that I would not get a second chance.

“Now be a good girl and give me no more trouble,” he said, and it was impossible not to detect the warning in those words. I could neither nod my head nor shake it, though you can be sure I shook it when he pulled down my britches. I could have closed my eyes and willed my mind away, but instead I looked into Silver’s eyes- those warm eyes I had once found friendly- and silently pleaded with him to let me go. I think I did reach him for a moment, for he hesitated when he saw my first tear- but then he looked away from my face and proceeded about his business.

His hands that had so often been warmed by the heat of the kitchen were now cold when he touched me between my legs, and opposing instincts seized my body- to dig myself into the ground to escape his touch, and to lean upwards into him and accept it. I jerked one way and another, shivering from his cold hands and yet not wanting to lose their nearness. If only I had been able to say yes! If only I could get rid of that last vestige of myself that existed outside his influence! Perhaps I could have enjoyed what was to come, but he had seduced me just enough so that I desired him, but not enough that I did not fear him, and it was a terrible position to be in.

“That’s right, my darling girl,” he said, and I could not tell in that moment if he was comforting or mocking me. “It can all be so easy…”

His darling girl. Those words hit me with such a beautiful pain, and how I wished that I could have accepted them wholeheartedly! If he had taken more time to woo me, if he had waited until I was more sure, anything but this, anything but here on the ground pinned beneath him with no recourse for escape.

In due time, my body though not my heart gave way and he found the signs that he had been looking for. A mixture of his hand’s work, stark dread and the old familiar ache I had once felt to have him kiss me had readied my body for his, and while some may say this proves me nothing but a pirate’s whore, I do not count this as my own crime but his- for he was a pirate who knew many ways of endangering a girl and bending her to him, by her will or against it. I think up until that moment, some part of me still held out hope that he would not finish what he had begun. But if he had been having any doubts, it seemed this assuaged them, at least temporarily, as he climbed on top of me and pushed himself in, robbing me of my maidenhead.

I felt pain, as I had long been warned I would, but it was not so terrible that I might die of it, for Silver was slow and gentle in betraying his cabin girl. He kissed me on my lips though my eyes still pleaded with him, and though I quietly begged him to stop, he spoke over me, telling me over and over how dear to him I was, what a clever girl who could read both maps and the stars, what a fine pirate I’d make. Soon enough, though, he no longer spoke except to softly moan and sigh, and his gentleness grew rougher with each moan.

And to my shame, I began to gasp myself- for air, mostly, pressed as I was beneath a man, but also from the knot in my stomach. That heat I had felt for Silver in the old days, before I knew him to be a pirate and a murderer and a betrayer of his friends, would stubbornly not leave my body no matter how much my mind demanded that it must. There was a sort of friction between his body and mine that caressed me in the most sensitive places, and the heat only grew with each unwanted kiss he gave me. My body grew tenser than it had ever been before, my skin turned to shivers, and I yearned for each bit of friction between us even as I dreaded it.

I thought in those moments of prisoners slain by pirates and envied them the clarity of thought they must have had in their final moments, for there was no clarity in mine at all.

“My girl,” Silver told me again, and from the constriction in his speech I knew he felt something of what I felt. “My precious girl. Just us now, just us against the world, just us and no one else…”

He kissed me again, and it was then that I came the closest to crying out, for there was a shuddering feeling throughout my lower half that caused me to dig my nails into the flesh of my palms that I might stop it. Feeling this as his final encouragement, Silver pushed in again harder than before, and before long I felt him start to shake within me- and then, in an instant, he had the presence of mind to withdraw from me quickly. Though my blood stained us both, the only stain he left was one upon the ground.

“Told you I’d look after you, didn’t I?” he said. “You won’t be getting in trouble on my account.” (I did not know what he meant until a horrified Dr. Livesay explained it to me.) Silver pressed me to his chest in an embrace, and I took what comfort I could from that. Somewhere in there, I imagined I could find my old friend who had taught me to read the stars and declared me to be his before the storm. I allowed him to wipe the tears from my face, to pull my clothing to rights and even to take my hand as he led me back to the campsite. I wondered if any of the pirates knew what he had done to me. I wondered if any of them cared.

Silver would later hand me a loaded pistol and trust me not to fire it into his black heart. His certainty is one of the things that still haunts me.

I would ultimately leave my grand adventure with enough money to make myself and Grandma comfortable for the rest of our lives, and having rescued poor Ben Gunn. I cannot count my voyage an entirely cursed one. Even with Silver, I try to remember the good times, the stars and the storms, so that I may feel some of the old love return. And yet my nightmares haunt me, as well as a question posed by Long John Silver’s wicked mathematics.

Two shares are bigger than seven. And one share is bigger than two. So it may have been that he meant to kill me all along, once it was the question of myself or the treasure, but there is another possibility I have considered.

Two shares can become one if a man takes a wife. Is that what he meant for me to become, or to call me? Like Calico Jack and Anne Bonny, he might have thought. He could have kept all the treasure and me besides, and all alone at the end of the world, without friend or family, I would never have escaped him.

But then, I do not know.

When he died, I cried out both with sorrow and with relief- but I never went to see his body. I could not have stood to see such a thing. But it has left me to wonder forever if he really died, or if I will see him again someday outside the window of our cottage, older and angrier and seeking the girl he counted as part of his treasure.

His parrot calling out and heralding his arrival is the cue that I am having another nightmare of the one-legged man.


End file.
